Local governments and a leading psychiatric association are launching a program to keep convicted criminals with mental illness from landing behind bars and beef up the services offered to current inmates in state prisons and county jails.
Two million Americans with serious mental illness are locked up in county jails each year and many others occupy cells in state and federal prisons. Experts agree that prisons and jails are no place to treat mental illness, but these facilities have become the de facto mental hospitals throughout most of the U.S. Oftentimes, advocates say, mentally ill inmates do not pose a threat to others and could receive better treatment from within the community.
While legislation introduced to Congress in April would address mental illness within the prison system at the federal level, this new alliance called theStepping Up Initiative is the first nationwide collaboration between local and state governments to focus on the issue, says Renee Binder, president of the American Psychiatric Association which is a partner in the new program.
[For more of this story, written by Amy Nordrum, go to http://www.ibtimes.com/mental-...edge-improve-1940462]
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